Markdown
Formatting you can read as plain text.
Where it came from
Markdown was created in 2004 by John Gruber with Aaron Swartz, to let people "write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format" that converts to HTML. The pitch was radical: source should be readable as-is.
It conquered the web sideways — GitHub, Reddit, Stack Overflow, and every docs site (including this one) render Markdown. What began as a blog tool became the documentation lingua franca.
How it works
Conventions are intuitive: # heading, **bold**, *italic*, - list, > quote, [text](url) link, `code`. The formatting is a thin layer over plain text you can still read raw.
The catch is ambiguity — dozens of dialects (GitHub Flavored, CommonMark). UWC converts Markdown ↔ HTML both ways client-side, handling the common subset without a server.
Convert Markdown
Markdown to HTML for the web, or HTML back to Markdown — rendered locally.